Flooding in India’s Northeast reveals weakness of the Act East Policy

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Flood mitigation and disaster risk reduction should be at the center of any major infrastructure drive in an ecologically and geomorphologically vulnerable region like the Northeast. That should be common sense for policy planners and donors; yet, it isn’t. The much-touted Act East Policy is a prime example of this.

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First, any connectivity infrastructure that passes through the Northeast needs to be more resilient to floods than usual. It has to be comprehensively disaster-proof. This would mean building resilient infrastructure, rather than just infrastructure. There is almost no talk about this within the Act East Policy, which risks reducing its infrastructure push into a costly and even pointless affair.

Second, there has to be a pointed focus on creating infrastructure that is sensitive to local geomorphological dynamics and community needs, so that they don’t end up worsening the conditions for or consequences of annual floods.

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In that sense, infrastructure programs in the Northeast need to be highly context-sensitive. In the Northeast, this “context” is made up of an intricate set of endemic and emerging parameters – ecological vulnerability, geomorphological shifts, annual floods, agrarian patterns, social friction, and climate change. There is little to suggest that the Act East Policy’s infrastructure push recognizes these complex realities.

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